


A New Exterior

by gelbes_gilatier



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: Coming of Age, Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-10
Updated: 2012-12-10
Packaged: 2017-11-20 20:31:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/589357
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gelbes_gilatier/pseuds/gelbes_gilatier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When Violet Crawley was still a Blyther-Hamfield, her father used to have a favorite saying. A saying she detested, as soon as she knew what “to detest something” meant.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	A New Exterior

**Author's Note:**

> [Holiday Fic Request Meme](http://gelbes-gilatier.livejournal.com/289880.html). Violet, dear **rareb** and other readers is one tough cookie and I honestly hope I did her justice because if I didn't... well. Anyway, I hope you all like it :)

A New Exterior

  
_“The "inferior sex" got a new exterior_   
_We got doctors, lawyers, politicians too._   
_Everybody - take a look around._   
_Can you see - can you see - can you see_   
_There's a woman right next to you.”_   


_Eurythmics, “Sister Are Doin’ It For Themselves”_

When Violet Crawley was still a Blyther-Hamfield, her father used to have a favorite saying. A saying she detested, as soon as she knew what “to detest something” meant. He said it every other day, every time Violet dared to utter her disapproval about something he had said or something he had done or, most often, something he expected of her.

He’d said it when she said she did not want to attend that Ladies’ Academy where she only learned how to bob curtseys and do needlework, but not _real_ things. He’d said it when she’d railed against being forbidden to travel to India. And he said it when she protested against having to marry the man her parents had chosen for her because _she did not care about_ becoming the Countess of Downton.

“Life isn’t all beer and skittles.”

That’s what he’d said and it had always sounded just a bit too rough, just a bit too vulgar for someone who had a pedigree as distinguished as the Blyther-Hamfields had. She hated him when he said it. And she hated him when he did not listen to what she had to say about something he threw at her. He never once did.

Violet Blyther-Hamfield became Violet Crawley, Countess of Downton and she found out that she did care a great deal about it, after all. The Earl was a stern man – though too refined to ever tell her that “life isn’t all beer and skittles” – but he provided for her. In time, Violet learned that life _was_ more than beer and skittles, more than an arranged – and in time companionable and comfortable – marriage, more than being a countess.

There was an heir who grew up to be a soldier and a daughter who needed to be protected from meeting the wrong men. There was an estate and money and at some point, there wasn’t much left of it anymore.

When the Earl and she resolved to tell the heir that a bride with a sizable dowry would receive preferred approval before one he fancied for whatever young men those days thought was fashionable, she found herself biting her tongue so she would not tell her son to buck up and do as needed. It was the first time she envied  her father for never mincing words on that particular score. Someone had to tell him that… but he got it anyway.

With her new daughter in law, restraint on that part became a lot more difficult. Americans and their fanciful ideas of how life should be always tried her patience and her daughter in law was the worst of all, because she could not very well make her go away. More than once she’d wondered if life might have been less daunting without an American in the house, after all.

There had been trials and tribulations and ample opportunity for her father’s words to resound in her head. She had hoped they would be worn out after so many years, worn thin like an old carpet, threadbare, fading out of existence. They just grew stronger, along the realization that most of Society were terrible bores and the subsequent development of a tongue sharper with each year. That the Earl died shortly after the American came into the house did not make it easier to soften herself.

There’d been a child, a year after the wedding, a girl and Violet Crawley had been determined to ignore the fact that a boy would have been far more desirable. She had never quite gotten over her father’s disapproval of the fact that she never miraculously turned into the heir he had needed so desperately. She had wanted the girl to be strong and opinionated and sharp as a knife. Those less in favor of Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Downton, would have said she had wanted Mary to be her spitting image.

So the only one surprised at herself is Violet Crawley when Mary trips over her own feet at four years old and starts to cry in the garden and she tells her without thinking, “Do try to stop your wailing, child. Things like this happen. After all, life is not all beer and skittles.”

There is a shocked second, for Violet more than Mary and then the little girls starts laughing, a hiccupy, watery sort of laugh that whisks a smile on Violet’s reluctant lips. Maybe her father was right. Maybe he was not. One way or the other, his slightly crude, slightly bourgeois way of telling his daughter to stop being a whiner made Mary laugh when she was in pain, so whether he was right or not, he was _useful_ , at least this once. And she guesses that is more than most women her age can say of their fathers. She smiles again, just for herself this time.

  



End file.
